According to John Boehner, the House minority leader and representative from Ohio, now slated by some pundits to succeed Harry Reid as Speaker of the House, President Obama failed to deliver on any of his campaign promises. I don’t recall that Rep. Boehner actually missed the votes on the Health Care Reform Bill, the flagship of the Obama administration’s legislative agenda, but perhaps he forgot. American memory is notoriously short, especially, it would seem, among Republicans. Granted, the eventual result was a battered, bruised, nipped, tucked, and compromised version of the original bill, but it did effect the most sweeping changes in the American health system since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid (features of our system that, like Social Security, the Republican Party opposed tooth and nail and succeeded in hamstringing at every turn they could find but now seem to be sacrosanct – go figger).
Even if the Republicans carry off the House and Senate, it is highly unlikely that they will roll back the vote on Health Care Reform. In the end, they may even help to fix it. I am more concerned about their taking aim at the environmental initiatives reintroduced by the Obama administration after the devastation wrought under the previous regime. Like the sub-prime mortgage debacle, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was a long time a-building.
Things may change drastically for the Democratic majority on Tuesday. The American public is understandably impatient to see a quick and solid recovery from the collapse of the economy patiently engineered under the watchful eye of the eight-year Bush administration. Blaming the Obama administration for not recovering fast enough is like Russians hollering because it took too long to raise the Kursk. It’s a lot easier to sink a ship than raise one.
Still, Tuesday is a long ways off as such things go. Especially given the number of attack ads the viewing public still has to endure.
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